Category: Image Manipulation

I did some more adjustments to the poster to make some elements look more believable – especially that panther on the tree trunk.

Before adjustment – the sides of the panther are too light / softAfter adjustment: Added black mask underneath the image of the panther, and masked the panther on appropriate areas so some parts look darker.

Also added a tree trunk so it doesn’t look like it’s hanging off the tree.

Before color adjustmentAfter some color adjustment

I also added 3d treatment to the text by enabling the drop shadow function on layer effects, so that it is more legible.

(The class learned intricate selection on week 10 and I missed out on it because of horrible indigestion??????? :’) shyet)

Update on poster parody:

Changed the face of the boy and added a facepalm. (Painted a part of the elbow as well, haven’t perfected it yet)

Adjustment layers for the face (on right side). Filled one layer with darker brown and set it to overlay to match my skintone with the boy’s body. One layer for shadowing, and another for adding dirty stains on the face.How it currently looks likeStill working on the text.

14/9/2016

QC

As a follow-up to QC, I fixed the lighting and saturation on the tiger and the boy’s body so that it matches the environment’s hue better.

(Before-After)

Also added little effects such as this sun ray hitting the panther -because it is sitting up high on the tree I guess it would be one of the first object to be hit by the sunlight?

Little changes that made all the difference.

Will definitely be fixing the color tones before test printing it (hopefully by this weekend!)

18/09/2016

So it’s Sunday, 10:29 PM and I’m on the verge of driving myself to craziness from standing on the edge of having too much to do and not knowing what to do this is not the martian vlog

Made some subtle touch ups to the poster, major changes being on the saturation of boy’s body and the panther.

Before – after saturation adjustment

I think the arm still looks quite off so I’ll have to work on it again.

Just editing the tiger’s fur……. using eraser size 1pt… kAdded shadow on the grass where the tiger steps on (sorry about the chat notif D:)*cough attempted to cough* Masked a part of the tiger so the appearance of the bear’s fur look naturalMade the body yellow-er to match the hand & environment’s hue better. Decreased saturation on my face.Adds noise on my face because the image is quite low-res while the picture face was more HQ and smooth than the rest.

(Speaking of which, these are the two pictures I used for the poster)

It’s looking a lot better now!!!! Going to work on the texts.

Still fixing the tiger’s furs though. :’)

This doesn’t look too bad! Forgot the actor’s names though.

Will testprint on A3 tomorrow to see how the colors will turn out, and how salvage-able the resolution will be.

Drafts on two of my approaches on how to parody this “Jomblo Book” (just testing out the composition).

There’s a third approach that I would also like to try, with a different version of The Jungle Book poster where the boy faces the temple.

This poster is interesting because of the depth of field. Might change the animals to ladies, and have polaroids of ex-girlfriends stuck on the temple? Not sure how clear this parody will be, but I’ll try to make the draft.

These are some parody movie posters which I find hilarious. I think the reason they’re hilarious because viewers can relate to the joke almost immediately. The visual cues are clear, straight to the point. I like the Insurgent parody poster a lot, because the poster is almost exactly the same (save for the addition of clothes and detergent bottles) but the joke works well. I think the “Ex-Men” poster would’ve been better if the people featured are the actual casts (or maybe they are, but they’ve gone unrecognisable?????). Some of the execution aren’t so great but the humour overrode it, such as that Lord of the Bling poster- the dollar necklace obviously look out of place but Gollum’s face and the relevance to the story makes it hilarious anyway. “Reception” is nicely executed, it doesn’t look much photoshopped, but the visual hints are rather small, although it is helped with the copy line down below that explains the parody. Liberal Farts is hilarious to imagine – farts with such force that light/smoke/fume can be seen and it sends the papers flying? Surreal.

I’m currently thinking of parodying either The Hobbit(Hobbo/Hobby?) : Battle of Five Armies(Armpits) or The Jungle(Jomblo) Book.

Ok, I know that they’re holding their swords, but it almost looks like they want to show off some non existent armpit hair (which will be existent, if I were to parody this).

As for The JOMBLO Book, I’m thinking of replacing the background with barren forest (because jomblo -> gersang) and make it look like as if the boy (and animals?) are staring into the distance at some ladies (or something). Second idea is to leave the background be, but rather than having the animals posing idly, they’ll be doing their mating stuffs (yes, lol) while the boy (whose face should be replaced by myself I suppose???) looks into the distance (or cover his eyes- I can add a lower arm extension the already stretched out right arm). This idea came upon me almost instantly, not quite sure what inspired it either but the joke seems fitting.

No moodboard yet, but here’s a lovely picture of two bears.

We also learned one last technique (no this is not some pre-fighting-villain-final-training episodes in anime) on Photoshop this week, which is Vanishing Point (even the name sounds like some ninjutsu :’) ). It eases manipulation images with perspective and although it’s an old and rarely used function, it’s useful nonetheless.

I haven’t done this exercise yet because somehow my Photoshop doesn’t have the plug-in, but I’ll do it and post the screenshots here ASAP.

27/8/2016
Brainstorming while sketching (as usual)

(Ridiculous fact: I actually posted this on instagram and one of my friend directy asked “Is this supposed to be Jungle Book?”. I guess this pose is very iconic, or does my friend have crazily acute observation skill???)

All of these ideas look promising, now let’s have a look on things that can be improve:

For the baby-liquor poster, you might want to ‘merge’ the usual sanitizer bottle with the visual traits of a famous liquor. Then, visualise the bottle within a situation where parents with toodler might use it. For the copy (text) in this poster – if you plan to use that – make sure you put where the information came from (on the footnote), as well as add ‘Do you know’ as the headline of the copy.

It is interesting that with the Oreo ones, you got almost everthing except THE image itself – manipulated accordingly of course 🙂 The composition is fine, just questioning the black background.

Cheers!

— Emanuel P.—

-Added hand sanitizer pump on the liquor bottle

-Added a headline

-Added the product & information source down below

-Made a new draft (as a series composition to the “You cannot be too sure of what you’re eating” idea)

Image used

-Morphed the oreo with dirty tissue, played with the background.

One of the 1000’s of high resolution textures available from Mayang’s Free Textures – see http://www.mayang.com/textures/ This texture may not be sold without permission from the authors.

Image used

16/08/2016

I changed the approach of the tagline to -hopefully- make the message clearer, because a lot of unhygienic things are not realised / recognised as one. Ironically, kitchen sponge has 200,000 times more bacteria than toilet seat (I knew it!! I’ve always doubted them) and using it only transfers bacteria from one place to another (weeell, bye bye clean dishes). I morphed the bun with two kitchen sponges- hopefully that is clear enough.

Still wondering about the composition.

19/08/2016

(QC followup)

-deleted the woman on the background

-changed the tagline & added the new tagline as a copy instead

-will be printing this soon, hopefully the resolution is alright (God help)

31/08/2016 (EVALUATION)

(image will be inserted later, screw wordpress’ server)

-Size of the burger should be bigger; it doesn’t look proportional to the size of the hand.

This week was a QC week on our ideas for the surreal composition (in which I chose surreal advertisement).

Out of the few ideas that I presented, the baby-drinking-liquor-shots one was the most entertaining. (Apparently the technique of those kind of posters – revealing bad side of another product to persuade people go through the other alternative- is called testimonial). I was suggested to add a sanitizer-parodied liquor bottle, using iconic liquor bottle which is easily noticeable.

This is a draft that I made in class, which I’m not too happy about.

I decided to revise it and use another picture. I think this one creates a bigger impact because the tone is slightly darker and the fact that there is an adult figure in it, not trying to do anything about the baby drinking liquor makes it a lot more surreal. (Hopefully dads won’t take it too badly on what seems to be a portrayal of neglectful fathers) I haven’t add the logo yet.

The “superbug” idea could be fun as well, the “superbug” being a vectorised character placed in real life images (this relates to the previous character design assignment).

As for the food-morphing-into-unhygienic-object idea, I was suggested to go through it from a different angle; not the one eating the food, but the person preparing the food.

I’d most likely use either one of these two pictures because they’ve got good focus on the food and very HD. I could perhaps morph the green leaves into crumpled, dirty money (because US dollars – green).

The other idea of food-turning-into-something-else-when-it’s-about-to-be-bitten idea seems far fetched now because of the difficulty to find high-res image without watermarks. I found a lot of hilarious images while searching for it, though.

I thought the Trump picture would work very well- I can replace the magnum ice cream with a chicken drumstick and morph it with something. I’ll try to find a higher quality picture of it. (The Obama pictures are also hilarious)

So I decided – what if – just to feature the hand and food, without the face.

If this looks blurry, I have the excuse that the fingers are meant to be blurry because it’s focused on the oreo. If currently the oreo is also blurry, I’ll morph it with a higher quality image of unhygienic object. Hopefully this one works. Not so sure yet about the ambiance though – I like the black background contrasting with the hand & oreo but it might look too dark? Let’s give it a shot (non liquor) first.

Speaking of unhygienic objects, I’ve been searching it in Google images to get ideas (the easier keywords “dirty things” gave me an entirely different result, so).

This week’s lecture was fairly short, only covering one topic and after that the class was dismissed – not without an assignment brief and ideas to explore and wonder about, of course.

But let’s not go there first and talk abut what this “CAS” is.

CAS is short (or at least, I shortened it as so) for Content Aware Scaling, which allows you to fit an image to certain dimension that doesn’t really fit with the original image, but without actually stretching it.

Left original, Right scaled

Firstly we have to select the area that we want to “protect” (from being stretched out). It’s usually the object / focal point that we want to preserve the shape. We can use lasso tool or masking to select the area. After that, create new channel for the selection. Select the image (take care not to select just the new channel that you’ve created) and go to Edit > Content Aware Scaling. Scale the picture like you’d do in free transform, and fill out the whole canvas. Voila!

You can see that the picture now stretches to the entire canvas, but it doesn’t make it look so stretched. We did two experiments on this one, masking just the bridge and masking the bridge plus the centered part of the picture on the second try. The second try’s result looks better, because the part that we focus our eyes on the most isn’t stretched, so it brings down the possibility of the picture to be recognised as a horribly stretched out image.

This particular technique is useful for packaging because most often that not, packaging have their own specified dimensions (by the client) and the picture that you need to, perhaps, cover parts of the packaging just isn’t in the correct dimension but you have to make it work somehow.

Other results of content awareness scaling

07/08/2016

For our next assignment, we are required to create a surreal, digitally manipulated image. We can choose between 2 briefs – to create a surreal imagery based on dreams, or surreal advertisement (on either one of these: Automotive, Fast Consumer Moving Goods, or Fashion.

I choose surreal ads because I am more familiar with it, due to my research last term for Contextual class. It is also more intriguing to me, because ads have real purpose rather than just stunning aesthetics, and I think that there are a lot of smart, witty ideas that can be applied to surreal advertisements.

Surrealism was originally started by Andre Breton (made official in Paris) as a form of art and literary movement that sought to unleash creativity from the mind without logical reasoning or boundaries. Breton used the “automatism” technique, creating without paying attention to the aesthetics nor usual boundaries and social norms. Surrealist technique was then “re-newed” by Salvador Dali – he calls the method “Paranoid-critical”. (From what I understand,) It is basically creating art within subconscious, unleashing all the ideas while still retaining some consciousness. Techniques for surrealist art were painting and mix media collage (Max Ernst experimented with collage technique during the Dada & Surrealist period).

Now, with the advancement of technology, surrealist images can be created with the help of Photoshop and many other digital software. The execution for it is way easier these days, but having the idea to create a stunning, shocking surrealist image isn’t quite the case. Surrealist images in advertisement are less dream-like but more “shocking”, “stunning”, and while they still having the “other-worldly” quality, the effect and impact that the images brought is different. These shocking advertising with often repulsive but mind-opening images are called (true to its impact) ‘Shock Advertising’. Surrealist implementation in advertisement (and perhaps graphic design) was found earliest in Czechoslovakia – they had a long history of surrealist movement and the residue still shows in their to-date ads.

I was going to make an advertisement for wet wipes, but after researching on it, I found out that anti bacterial wet wipes and hand sanitizer actually weakens human resistance to bacteria. In some cases, the overuse of anti-bacterial products would kill the good bacteria that are fighting the bad bacteria, causing the bad bacteria to grow to be resistant to the anti-bacterial and eventually resistant to antibiotics. This kind of bacteria are called “superbugs”. Wet wipes are actually also dangerous, as they transfer bacteria to other surface. A few squirts of hand sanitizer, apparently, is equal to few shots of hard liquor. There has been no study which proves that anti-bacterial products are more effective than regular soaps, and that people who use them aren’t much healthier.

Equipped with this new discovery, I’ve currently drew up some draft ideas for the poster. To promote the use of non-alcohol & non-perfumed wet/baby wipes (Mitu Baby Wipes?) rather than hand sanitizer, I’d have a baby on the poster drinking liquor shots. The idea came from the fact that hand sanitizer actually have alcohol and a few drops of the are equal to hard liquor, and many younger children & teen caught alcohol poisoning due to the ingestion of hand sanitizer. There’s also the concerning fact that some parents applies hand sanitizer on their babies’ hand. (But babies lick and bite on their fingers all the time!) Dangers of Hand Sanitizer

The second idea is to promote washing hands instead of using wet wipes nor hand sanitizer, because apparently both products often contain alcohol and it’s still the best to cleanse your hand the primitive way – (REGULAR) hand soap and water. Due to the anti-bacterial agents in wet wipes and hand sanitizer, good bacteria on the skin (which fights off bad ones) are killed, while bad bacterias will develop resistance to anti-bacteria and eventually, antibiotics. Because of this, humans’ resistance on bacteria will actually drop lower, making their body more susceptible to be caught by harmful bacteria which cause sickness. In this idea, the poster will feature a person with humanoid head, but with a germ/bacteria body (symbolising their bodies’ lower resistance to bacteria & germs). Antibacterial vs Normal Soap

In my third idea (also promoting normal hand soap instead of anti-bacterial ones), I want to focus on this “superbug” and have it portrayed as literally as possible on the poster. Yes, a bug or germ with a red cape (or maybe black, because this “superbug” is the villain in the bacteria-germ-human game). “You don’t win the fight by killing (good bacterias)” is the “tagline” that I came up with for the poster. I think this has a loophole because technically, regular soap do kill bacteria, albeit not killing the good bacteria (somehow). And if a hand soap advertisement promotes to not kill bacteria, what would common folks think?? I guess they’d be fairly confused by it.

Fourth idea is “YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT” (inspired by the Lifebuoy ad campaign). Similar with the second idea, the poster will feature a humanoid head ((plus a hand holding something up to eat with their bare hands)), but with non-human body. In this idea, I want to replace the bodies with reportedly dirtiest areas with most bacteria per square inch. (Toilet bowl, door handle, elevator button, etc.)

Fifth idea, which I thought about in shower quite recently, is to have a person holding something up to eat, close to their mouth, ready for the bite. The twist is, yes, that “something” won’t exactly be a food. It’d be partially / wholly replaced by dirty items with similar shape or color to the food. For example, donut would be replaced with the opening to a toilet bowl, fried chicken will be replaced by dirty leather shoe, etc.

I hope I’ll keep coming up with more solid and conclusive idea, but one thing is certain now – this ad will be very.bacterial.related.

I’ve added several different poses to the character, as well as some accessories that doesn’t distract too much. After taking shots of the place that I want them to be, I can finally decide on the lighting. So far, I’ve only drafted the desktop background and one of the postcard image (site: UIC).

This beach image was taken in Bali – I plan to have some of my characters running on top of the umbrellas, so I’ll have to tweak on the compositions a bit so it doesn’t look too crowded.I chose to work on this picture because the lighting is interesting and I can play a lot on the shadowing of my characters.

Back of the postcards (variations)

QC 29/07/2016

I was suggested to crop the image (for the 1st postcard) to tone down the things that needed to be focused on. The idea of “meh” peering from the edge of the paper is Sir Em’s idea- “meh” will be featured in each and every one of the postcard, lurking around with a judging and suspicious face.

(Before & After editing)

For this one, I was told to improve the lighting, blur some areas (like playing with the focal length) and make the back part darker, so the focus on the character is strong.

I haven’t decided on the last postcard, a location in my house. Right now it’s cluttered everywhere, maybe I can have my characters clean up the mess on my table instead of me – I’ve got assignments to do. (Cheers)

Postcard 1 & 2

01/08/2016

SO FAR ON SHERLOCK SEASO—

During the weekend I’ve been working on the 3rd postcard image, as well as troubling myself with the desktop background. I’ve created several variations (including the draft I created in class) but nothing seems quite right.

I like how this one is very HQ and the lighting & shadows are very smooth (I used gradient – soft light) but I feel like there isn’t a story to it and the background is too crowded. So I decided to scrap this and start a new edit.

The story on this one is that con (red head) is trapped inside the laptop screen (which shows The Sims 4), while sans walks out freely on the real world. Feedbacks I received on this are that sans’ angle is off – the perspective needs to be fixed, and the laptop screen is too noisy. I agree with how noisy the background looks (I first thought that it’d look fine if I blur it out but noooo) so I decided to yet again start on another edit due to the increasing dissatisfaction on this one.

This image has a similar plot to the previous one – con is trapped inside the wine bottle while meh watches judgingly, and sans observes from afar.

(Pending feedback on this one)

I like this one the most because it tells a story, but at the same time the environment feels so fake (the picture was taken for photography class on depth of field experiment). This feels the most agreeable though, out of all the variations I did.

EXTRA

I printed out a mini character guidebook (just for fun!)

I also test printed the postcard images. One image looks way too dark so I’ll have that fixed.

The colored background (back of the postcard) encountered some problems while printing – the colors are too bright and the output has these lines on it. The printshop had tried to fix it to no avail – thankfully there three pieces that don’t look so horrible.

(They tried to reprint it using a different printer, but there are still lines)

This week we headed straight on to our first (major) assignment, which is designing a self-promoting character. The character design should be based on our personality and the outputs will be in forms of postcards and desktop background. These vector-made characters will be placed at real-life settings (campus, home, and one free choice of place). Usage of smart object & smart filter will be exercised as we put the vector art into Photoshop and combine them with the background (image taken by ourselves).

This is a advertising campaign for fritz-kola “vielvielkoffein”, done by Rocket & Wink (found on behance). I find these hilarious because of the obvious wordplay. From “wachtel” which means quail (bird) to wachhund (watch dog, still normal) to wachbaer (watch bear), wachforelle (watch tuna), to wachhalla, wachilles (self-explanatory laughter); all of them posing in retrospect to the shape of the quail bird. The character design doesn’t have too much details but they’re cute, has strong visual impact and incite laughter.

Punny characterised illustrations by Mauro Gatti on Behance. This kind of shed light on how some English phrases/compound words are hilarious when taken (and illustrated) literally. I’m thinking of finding a phrase that’d describe myself in a nutshell to add a striking and hopefully funny characteristic to my design.

Illustrations done by Marylou Faure on Behance. This is the sort of style I am aiming for my character design, kind of art deco-ish and showing some exaggerated geometrical shapes. These characters, although simple, show a lot of personality through the colors and shapes used. Their poses also suggest strong personality and individuality; the different characters of several women.

There are some sketches and doodles going on; I have a vague idea on how I want my character to look, but nothing concrete yet and I feel like they lack visual impact. Hopefully with more research I can find new insights about myself and how to present myself in form of a 2D vector art.

Current moodboard

22/7/16

Sketches and mini brainstorming:

While doodling I thought about what trademark / iconic physical trait could this character have. The first few doodles were based on the thought of androgyny, combining the male-female symbol and put it as a physical trait for the character.

Then I realised that the shaded part (two parts poking out symbolising the gender sign) is kind of shaped like my hair and my fringe which tends to poke out to the right side, shaped by my glasses’ frame which it rests on.

It developed to this, one headed two legged (or hands, it could stand on its hands) thing. I excluded most anatomical parts because I want the focus to be on the head and I’m thinking of changing the hair colors as the mood of the character changes.

Many of my friends consider me to be very level-headed but that’s simply untrue (how did they get that kind of impression is beyond my comprehension).

23/07/2016

The character’s hair color changes and its limbs will be either outstretched our withdrawn depending on its mood. Blue haired is “sans” – chill, calm, normal-state. Red head with a kind of standing/tensing up pose is “con” – annoyed, angry, infuriated, at state of imbalance. Sans is Latin for “without” (Italian senza), while con means “with”. I used this theme because incidentally “sans” is like the short of my name. The changing of hair color is inspired from me being labelled as level-headed even though its untrue, so I put a twist to it and make my character leveled-head. The color indicates their level; sans is level 0, con is level 100. The closer the color is to the hue of red, the higher the level is. emo is at level -10. The one with squinted eyes (in the sketch its trait is ‘unamused’) is meh. and it is level 30.

It’s a bit late, but after a week of no inspiration on what to video for the cinemagraph exercise, I finally took 3 videos – each with different characteristics from each other.

One video is taken from inside the car very early in the morning, videoing the car moving past by and the lights changing. View here!and here

Another is a shot of a foot (courtesy of Felicia’s nice sneaker which color compliments the surrounding nicely) tapping on a window glass – totally random. View here!

Last one features aesthetics which look very “kekinian” (current), and the moving part will be the lights reflected of the tea. View here!

I initially really wanted to take a video which has a story in the movements in the .gif (original idea was phone light going on in a dark room, revealing a face of someone holding and scrolling down the phone, and then the light goes off again — happens in loop) but the more I ponder about it the more I realise (and fear) that I won’t be getting anything done if I just kept thinking about it, without the actual resource to make the video happen. So I decided to stop being too wishy washy about it and just recorded little things throughout the day.

I’ll be working on the gifs tomorrow, and hopefully get more interesting shots to work on till the end of the week.